I'm glad that someone (Dan) brought up the issue (pardon the pun!)
of Hayworth's trying to market the same information in both a serial and a
monograph. If one really evaluates the content of these journals (as one
should do for any journal), that evaluation, and the price, coupled with
the reliability of the publisher in terms of publication pattern, claiming
response, and customer service ought to be the criteria as to whether
subscriptions are renewed or not.Consistent bad performance in one or more
of these areas would seemingly justify cancellation of a subscription.

        Has nobody looked at this problem from the perspective that in
subscribing to a journal, one is, in effect, entering into a contractual
agreement with a publisher? If either party fails to uphold their end of
such a bargain, it would seem to me that that failure is a large part of
whether that contractual agreement continues or not! Publishers surely
don't keep sending issues when subscription payments aren't received!! As
an analogy: would you buy telephone, cable, or internet service from a
company that provided service with day-long gaps in their availability or
had consistent malfunctions which made communication impossible?? Delayed
issues, 'combined' issues, and such are not, in my humble opinion, too
different from a promised service which fails to produce the means of
scholarly communication -- which is, after all, the intent of journals.

Peter V. Picerno
<ppicerno@UTMEM.EDU>